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It’s not uncommon for games to be created that lack something unique, but rather create a little hook that allows them to stand out and be their own wonderful creation.  Bear With Me does exactly this, but instead of a little hook, the game is given its own facelift in a way that is considerably better than I could have imagined.

Bear With Me, for the most part, is a generic point and click adventure game.  You click around rooms to pick up objects and interact with them as well as othercharacters.  It functions well but there isn’t anything new or unique to say to this.  It’s a well put together point and click adventure game.

The noir detective setting isn’t too new either. Detective games have taken advantage of the nature of point and click adventures for a long time and it’s a good fit. The noir setting has been slipping in and out of the genre over the last few years as well, using the classic black and white colour scheme with dashes of red for dramatic effect.

What makes Bear With Me special is its art style and setting.  The story is of Amber, a young girl who wakes from a dream to discover her brother has gone missing.  Informed of this by her giraffe soft toy, Millie, she enlists the help of Ted E. Bear, a grumpy old private detective whose office is based out of Amber’s closet.  Between the two of them they need to discover in Paper City what happened to Flint while a red hooded figure follows them.

The story is basically made up of old noir and detective tropes, but filtered through the lenses of a young girl’s imagination.  This angle makes the game both unique and charming as all heck.  The humour comes by way of some of the characters being firmly presented as older characters, like Ted being an old alcoholic, or Millie being an older, super nice woman.  These offer their own humour and the jokes are far from limited to this.  Other humour comes by way of banter between characters and Amber’s interpretation of the world when her imagination goes wild. Her mind wanders to weird places when you click objects like lights and paintings and some fourth wall breaking that glued a big smile on my face at times.  The game pokes fun at everything including itself and its staff and this charm isn’t missed.

The art style is gorgeous, with a 2D animation which looks fantastic.  The setting and objects look good but the characters, especially Amber, look very unique, which gives the game its own fantastic feeling.  The music is good but the voice acting is very good. Some characters are not as good as others but Amber and Ted are great.

All of these aspects can be undone easily by bad gameplay and as many point and click adventures do it can get obscure with puzzles at times.  For the most part you need to find objects and regularly combine them in the right way.  There were some issues like a rope to cut where I tried to use a sword, which the character said no to, but when I used the knife it worked.

This seemed arbitrary, but most of the time Ted regularly is able to help if you click him.  I also found it hard to tell on occasion which were items or part of the scenery. This is a flaw created by the beautiful design, which does result in a little random clicking at times.

Bear With Me is a beautiful, sweet, dark, funny story that oozes with character.  Amber’s story is well worth enjoying, as it’s only short episode lengths of a couple of hours it never overstays its welcome.

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Bear With Me (PC) Review

Released: February 2017
Rating: M15
Platforms: PC (Windows 7 or Higher)
Genre: Point & Click, Adventure, Mystery
Developer: Exordium Games
Publisher: Exordium Games

4.5Overall Score
Gameplay
Graphics
Audio
Replayability
Reader Rating 0 Votes